Tristan Schmurr/Creative Commons Welcome to another of my “I told you they were dodgy” posts. This time, it’s not about Facebook or Google (which, finally, are receiving the coverage that should have been metered out years ago), but Wikipedia. The latest is on a Wikipedia editor called ‘Philip Cross’, a story which Craig Murray […]
Category: UK
Posts relating to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and to her territories.
UK picks on independent Tweeters, falsely calls them Russian bots and trolls
If you were one of the people caught up with ‘The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!’ and a selection of Cold War paranoia resurrected by politicians and the media, then surely recent news would make you start to think that this was a fake-news narrative? Ian56 on Twitter was recently named by […]
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Cambridge Analytica is merely Facebook’s ‘smaller, less ambitious sibling’
Beyond all that had gone on with AIQ and Cambridge Analytica, a lot more has come out about Facebook’s practices, things that I always suspected they do, for why else would they collect data on you even after you opted out? Now, Sam Biddle at The Intercept has written a piece that demonstrates that […]
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Business as usual at Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg comes forth, tells us nothing we didn’t already know
Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg came out and made a statement on Facebook that had no apology (though he gave a personal one later on CNN) and, at a time when people demanded transparency, he continued with opaqueness. First, he told us nothing we didn’t already know about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Secondly, he avoided […]
Is the death of expertise tied to the Anglosphere?
Foreign and Commonwealth Office Boris Johnson: usually a talented delivery, but with conflicting substance. I spotted The Death of Expertise at Unity Books, but I wonder if the subject is as simple as the review of the book suggests. There’s a lot out there about anti-intellectualism, and we know it’s not an exclusively […]
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Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: the signs were there for years, if one only looked
Facebook’s woes over Cambridge Analytica have only prompted one reaction from me: I told you so. While I never seized upon this example, bravely revealed to us by whistleblower Christopher Wylie and reported by Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison of The Guardian, Facebook has shown itself to be callous about private data, mining preferences even […]
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Happy birthday: Autocade turns 10
Above: Autocade can be hard work—and sometimes you have to put up less exciting vehicles, like the 2001–7 Chrysler Town & Country, for it to be a useful resource. March 8, 2018 marks 10 years of Autocade. I’ve told the story before on this blog and elsewhere, about how the site came to be—annoyed […]
We need to heed the warnings that Harry Leslie Smith gives
Not that Asian countries get this right all the time, but generally, when a 95-year-old speaks, we (as in many of us with Asian heritage, and by ‘Asian’ I mean a lot of cultures that make up the 3,700 million people on the continent) tend to listen and we revere their experience. And WWII veteran […]
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Orange may be the new black but the difference is less than you think
Instruct Studio It’s easy to dismiss comedians as, well, comedians, there to tell a joke and to get a laugh out of us. But what if the comedian—such as Frankie Boyle—is one of those who sees the state of the world we’re in, and “tells it as it is”? His opinion for The Guardian makes […]
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An accomplishment: debunking every single point in a Guardian article on Julian Assange
Elekhh/Creative Commons Suzi Dawson’s 2016 post debunking a biased Guardian article on Julian Assange is quite an accomplishment. To quote her on Twitter, ‘The article I wrote debunking his crap was such toilet paper that I was able to disprove literally every single line of it, a never-before-achieved feat for me when debunking MSM smears. […]